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For the first night of Chanukah, my husband got me one of my favorite films of 2004 on DVD: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I had seen only once in the theater. It was as good as I remembered - and I loved getting to see the deleted scenes - being an optimistic film for all its darkness and reminding me of Peggy Sue Got Married, only with a male protagonist, asking the same questions about whether love makes it worth making the same mistakes all over again, and in both cases concluding yes, it does.

But the sci-fi storyline about people who can choose to erase their memories to avoid recalling painful events makes me think about how relationships sometimes work on the internet. There seems to be a tendency for people to cut and run, changing their names, creating new identities, dropping old friends and picking up new friends the way people sometimes drop and change casual hobbies. That seems more rare in real life, though I guess I've known people to do similar things, pick up and move without warning or regret. This week I ran into someone online whom I had known in a fandom long past, who had pretended to be multiple people...to the extent of picking fights with herself just to shoot herself down and prove a point on a mailing list. It was kind of bizarre to stop and realize that actually I might have run into this person online many times since I thought I last "saw" her, but I wouldn't recognized her.

It is mystifying to me when people do this. Sometimes there is nothing funnier than getting confirmation that what you thought were two independent people (who obviously "knew" each other and whom you thought must have been friends because they praised one another's writing and picked fights with one another's adversaries) are actually the same person. But when you think you know someone, and then discover you only know 1/2 or so of them, the discovery can be unnerving and occasionally upsetting.

In other news, I have a new DVD burner but have discovered that none of my computer's four USB ports are 2.0 or high speed. Moreover, I don't have the video capture card I need to download footage from my camcorder, and I really need a bigger hard drive and could use more RAM. Guess what I'm lobbying for as a birthday present? That's right: a new Dell.

Trek BBS Today

Below are some of the topics currently being discussed at the Trek BBS:

These were some of the major news items from the week Star Trek Nemesis opened in December 2002:

Variety Calls Trek X 'Unambitious'"Despite the intriguing set-up, there's something unambitious and scaled-back about 'Star Trek Nemesis,' so that most of the time it feels like a slightly suped-up episode of the Next Generation TV series," wrote the trade paper's reviewer, who added, "Gone are the epic sense of quest and expansive casts of featured players that have informed the most memorable (and popular) 'Trek' pics."

Stewart Doesn't Want Trek X To Be The LastPatrick Stewart said he believed that if Nemesis did well, Captain Picard would fly again: "The cast will get these calls on the Saturday of opening weekend asking us to come back for another one." If it was the end, he added, "I'd miss the comradeship that has grown over 16 years of working with these people. We weren't just a crew, but really became a family."

'Nemesis' Stars Take To The Red CarpetReturning Star Trek: The Next Generation actors spoke of the pleasure of reuniting with the rest of the cast for the new film, while Trek newcomers such as Tom Hardy tried to get used to all the fan attention:

I didn't try to think of all that [while filming], because I had a job to do. It was terrifying enough turning up and trying to play a villain with a group of people who have been doing it for so long and are so good at it.